Israel's battlefield lacks divine charm and compassion of the biblical era

A destroyed section of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on September 17, 2024. Once the crown jewel of Gaza's proud medical community, the Palestinian territory's main Al-Shifa hospital has become a stark symbol of the utter devastation wrought by the Israel-Hamas war. [ AFP]

It is a fact that when it comes to espionage, Israeli agencies can be expected to exceed expectations. Even so, the recent alleged Mossad operation against Hezbollah militants in which thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies unexpectedly exploded in the pockets and faces of their owners, killing at least 37 and leaving 3,000 seriously wounded or maimed, was unprecedented and simply out of this world.

One commentator, totally flummoxed by the plot’s extraordinary complexity and scale, waxed lyrical. “If Israel did not do this,” he exclaimed, “then God did”. A number of world leaders and human rights organisations have vehemently condemned Israel for causing ‘indiscriminate collateral damage’ during these attacks.

The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani - who apparently possessed a Hezbollah communication device – reportedly lost an eye in the coordinated attack, an eventuality that is bound to heap further humiliation on Hezbollah and its Iranian benefactor who are still reeling from daring assassinations by Israel earlier in the year of high-ranking ‘Axis of Resistance’ personalities. Most prominent among these were influential Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and overall Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Since its inception in 1948, Israel’s story has been that of an astute underdog surviving incredibly amidst hostile neighbours who bitterly resent the presence of a Jewish state in Palestine, and in the case of arch-foe Iran and its ‘Axis’ surrogates, openly call for its annihilation.

To do this, Israel has had to fight many deadly wars including the famous Six Days (1967) and the Yom Kippur (1973), where it unexpectedly won comprehensive victories against combined Arab armies. In the process, it doubled its original land size, and also managed to grow into a thriving, democratic country.

The real reason why Israel is admired and valorised by many people around the world, however, has less to do with its modern victories and more with the biblical era when Moses, Joshua, Samson, David, Elisha and other Jewish ‘heroes of faith’ defied daunting contemporaneous superpowers such as Pharaoh’s Egypt and the dreaded Syrians through reliance on God.

Even Abraham, a grandfatherly character venerated more as the ‘progenitor of the faithful’ by Judaism, Islam and Christianity was no mean warrior, at one time deploying his rag-tag ‘army’ of a few hundred household servants to slaughter four Canaanite kings who had taken his nephew Lot captive.

The fact that Judaism is essentially a superset of the Christian religion which borrows extensively from the experiences of biblical patriarchs, which it then recast as preludes of future conflicts between the followers of Jesus and the malevolent hosts of Satan, makes today’s Israel have numerous ‘shareholders’.

Indeed, on a light note, Kenya alone has more ‘Jews’ than those residing in Israel on the basis of theophoric nomenclature. I looked up my own name John. It is indeed Hebrew, and (thankfully) means ‘graced by God’. Other names, such as Caleb, which means ‘a dog’ were no less exciting to explore.

This sacred symbiosis explains the intriguing and fanatical support for Israel found among America’s evangelical right - and indeed most of Christendom - which sometimes attains a clearly antichrist hue by callously justifying the slaughter of hapless Palestinians by the Israel Defence Forces. Yet in the real sense, Christianity and the entire corpus of Jewish experiences cannot be fully extricated. 

My whole point is that, deep down, many of those who by default support Israel would prefer to see it prosecute its wars with invocation of divine help as in the days of old, as opposed to relying wholly on its fabled kinetic capabilities and ‘ironclad’ American patronage.

It is perhaps a subconscious yearning for the return of Bible days in order to hasten the eschatological Second Coming, or a rational fear that at some point, Israel’s capacity to sustain numerous wars will be naturally depleted. What if something sinister, such as a nuclear attack on America, distracted its attention in the Middle East for some time? I argue that Israel’s current victories, spectacular though they be, have less lustre than those of biblical antiquity.

A particularly interesting characteristic of wars waged under God (if the term makes sense)- inconceivable in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel today- is that mercy was sometimes bestowed upon undeserving adversaries.

For instance, when the prophet Elisha misled Syrian troops right into the midst of Samaria and the excited King of Israel wished to slaughter them, the prophet uttered these memorable words. “You shall not smite them: would you smite those who you have not taken captive with your sword and bow? Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master.”

It is tempting to speculate what Prophet Elisha’s attitude towards the acute suffering of the hordes of Gaza would be, should he strut the Holy land again. Would he “set bread and water” before the starving Palestinian children, or would he endorse their further starvation just because Hamas attacked Israel horrendously on October 7, 2023? I wonder.