Trinity Sunday, Year C, 2025, June 15
Donald Seekins
Way back in 2019, which seems a very, very long time ago, I went to the Osaka International Church for their Sunday services. The place was crowded, and the pastor announced: “today is a special day, because we are going to talk about a very important topic – Israel.” He then described the vital role that the Jews and Israel, the “Jewish State,” would play in the End Times, when Jesus would return to earth to judge the living and the dead. A certain number of Jews would convert to Christianity and would be raised up to the realm of eternal bliss. But after the service, I asked the pastor about what would happen to those Jews who wanted to keep their ancient faith.
“They will go to Hell,” he answered.
Well, now it is my turn to talk about Israel!
In the words of an evangelical writer:
“The nation of Israel will take the central stage in the end time prophecy. When US President Donald Trump made the decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, almost 99 percent of world’s nations opposed him. Much of the world is against the interests of Israel. We can also see the rise of antisemitism around the world.”
Unquestioning support for Israel and the Jews – either because of their part in the Second Coming or their role as western history’s major victims and scapegoats – collided with Reality after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s unleashing of the Israeli war machine on Gaza; this series of air attacks and ground offensives by the Israeli army has caused the death of over 55,000 Palestinian people (probably a gross underestimation), most of whom were civilians rather than Hamas fighters. The whole Gaza area has been flattened, and resembles Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the atomic bombs. The people are slowly starving to death because Israel denies them aid.
Recently in the United Nations Security Council, a physician gave a graphic description of the horrors of Netanyahu’s war on Gaza, especially the suffering of children. The United States ambassador responded not by saying anything about Israel’s war crimes but by denouncing the “horrific” assassination of two Israeli diplomats in Washington by an anti-Semitic “terrorist.”
Even before the election of Donald Trump in November of last year, an unbroken string of vetoes by the United States against repeated calls in the UNSC for a cease-fire in Gaza has completely stripped American diplomacy of its moral legitimacy.
To those with a minimally objective awareness of history (paying attention to what actually happened rather than ideological justifications for what happened), the bloody siege of Gaza bears more than a passing resemblance to the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, when around 63,000 Jewish people were either killed or taken off to death camps by the Nazi SS. The parallel between the two events is stunning, but it has only rarely been mentioned even by critics of Netanyahu.
Sympathy for the Palestinians has been condemned by many powerful and influential people because they are “terrorists,” a label which seems to automatically remove them from any other group of human beings deserving of decent, humane treatment. That the Nazis probably thought the rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrorists and needed to be exterminated doesn’t seem to occur to Netanyahu or his loyal supporters both in Israel and the West. As “terrorists,” the Palestinians are dehumanized, seemingly deserving of total extermination – much as the Amalekites were in the Old Testament. Indeed, Israel’s rightwing politicians spout this sort of Old Testament-style genocidal nonsense on a daily basis (“Gideon’s chariots”).
For eighty years, since the end of World War II, a strange ideology has permeated what we could call the “Jewish Question” in the West. It is propelled by generous western support for the establishment of Israel (motivated by guilt over the Holocaust), money politics as pro-Israel lobbies have become very powerful in Washington and other western capitals and, above all, by an orthodox view of the Holocaust as unique, in kind as well as the number of victims, fundamentally different from other instances of man’s inhumanity to man. A weird kind of Manicheanism has emerged, in which pure Goodness is represented by the suffering Jew or his post-1945 Israeli counterpart, armed to the teeth and willing to settle any challenge from outside with a hail of bullets; or “Jewishness” in general, however it is defined. Pure evil is found in Hitler and the Nazis, but this concept of the Dark Side of humanity is easily transferred to peoples such as the Palestinians, other Arabs, Iranians and even Jews on American campuses who protest the war crimes in Gaza and are persecuted for being “anti-Semitic.” Jews who criticize Israel’s government are often accused of being “self-loathing.” The dream of a unified Jewishness, committed to the “Jewish state,” is a fiction promoted by powerful people which ignores real differences inside diverse and contentious populations of Jews.
“Anti-Semitism” has become a powerful weapon in the hands of the American and western European political establishment, especially President Trump, to silence critics of Israel and make sympathy for the Palestinians a crime (because they are “terrorists”). This is deeply, deeply cynical – basically a power grab. Trump describes his latest hate-object, Harvard University, as seething with anti-Semitism and a misguided sympathy for terrorists. Allowing Harvard to enroll foreign students will only, Trump says, increase the number of undesirables who will gain Harvard degrees and spread more anti-Semitic propaganda. Recently, Trump’s Department of Education said that it might remove accreditation from Columbia University in New York because the large amount of “anti-Semitism” on its campus.
Popular culture, especially Hollywood films, reinforces the idea that Nazis, or Germans, are totally evil and should be exterminated without mercy. In movies like The Dirty Dozen or Inglorious Basterds, American and other western audiences are told that it is all right, vicariously, to enjoy the torture and killing of the men in black uniforms with strange, ugly accents. It’s fun to kill Nazis! In the end, the coldness with which the suffering of people in Gaza is met in the West suggests that exposure to this and other propaganda about World War II doesn’t teach us how to distinguish good from evil but Nazifies our souls. We believe the Nazi is the exact opposite of us, an Other; but in fact he is often a mirror image of ourselves. It is probably a bad thing that Hollywood movies are so violent, but the kabuki-style homicides of, say, John Wick are rather different from the deep-and-dirty massacres lovingly depicted in Inglorious Basterds, which won raves from critics back in 2009.
Behind all this stands the fact that without unstinting support from the United States and its western allies, Netanyahu could not have carried out his war crimes in Gaza. A single, decisive stop it! from Washington could have halted the massacres: in 1981, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Israeli prime minister to retreat from Lebanon because the IDF was carrying out a “second Holocaust” in that country. But today the Israel lobby is so powerful and the ideological fog of philo-Semitism so dense that political leaders do mental acrobatics to justify their criminal neglect of the Palestinians. Remember that last year both Houses of Congress gave Netanyahu fifty-eight standing ovations while he spewed his hate-speech about “terrorists.”
Please note that I am not saying that Hitler and the Nazis were not evil, or that the horrors of the Holocaust have been exaggerated by philo-Semitic historians. I do not want to promote denialism, either of Nazi crimes or those of the Imperial Japanese Army in Asia. But we mustn’t think of Nazi or militarist crimes as some sort of distillation of pure Evil that emerged from nowhere. Rather, like all history-altering movements, their emergence depended on complex factors. And on the political level Nazism, like Japanese militarism, was probably more the product of moral cowardice rather than pure, unadulterated Evil. Many Germans acquiesced to Hitler for so-called “wholesome” reasons: love of country, indignation over the shoddy treatment of Germany after 1918, economic security, protection of their families and friends or Prussian-style “honor.”
In our fallen world, the seeds of evil are everywhere, even – if not especially – in technologically and economically “developed” societies such as our own. We have to be aware of the fatal conjunctures of people, ideas and economic/social conditions that cause the seeds of evil to sprout and flourish. In other words, “good” people that we are, promoting the peace and prosperity of our own societies, we can become Nazis.
In a few words, that is the lesson of the Holocaust.
Gaza is disturbing because it shows how so-called “good” people (Jews) are corrupted by evil. The Zionists in Gaza carrying out their war crimes stand in the shadow of the black-uniformed SS-man who ordered their parents and grandparents into the gas chambers.
