AFTER “THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN”

By Oscar H. Blayton

There is a narrative that many of us heard when we were children. This story tells how Joshua and the Israelites “Fought the Battle of Jerico.” According to one writer, “The story of the Israelite conquest of Jericho (Joshua 2-6) is one of the best known and best loved in the entire Bible. The vivid description of faith and victory has been a source of inspiration for countless generations of Bible readers.”

But that story is about invasion and war, and ultimately the deaths of a great number of people. And it gives us cause to wonder why it gives so many people a warm fuzzy feeling about their faith.

One answer to this question might be because it is a tale that helps some who share a Judeo-Christian imaginary built upon a foundational belief that there is a certain correctness of action when dealing with others outside of their faith community. The belief (or faith) underpinning this imaginary, and the sense of correctness of this religious community, incorporates a rather improbable set of events, which could be described as miraculous and evidence of divine favor.

After the people of Israel had ritualistically marched around the city of Jerico for several days, after they blew their ram horns and shouted, and after the walls came tumbling down; the story did not end there. The most important part of this story is what happened next.

According to the King James Version of the Bible, after the great walls were destroyed and the Israelites entered the city and “utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”

They also “burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.”

The Battle of Jericho has been described as one of the bloodiest episodes of the Old Testament. So how has it been characterized as an achievement that should be celebrated in song by little children?

This story is not a complicated one. There were “good guys” and “bad guys” and an ultimate power that weighed in on the side of the good guys, allowing them to prevail. This is why it is a joyous narrative celebrated in song.

Aristotle said that every action and pursuit is thought to aim at some good. But ever since long before Aristotle, people have debated what is “good.” Vanquishing your enemies is usually thought to be good. But when that vanquishing includes the slaughter of infants, the notion of “good” becomes shrouded in shadow and difficult to discern.

There are those who find a rationale in the Bible for slaughtering the infants of ancient Jerico and justify the bloodshed by explaining that the “Promised Land in which the Israelites were to settle was populated by the Canaanites who had corrupted and perverted God’s truth. They had corrupted themselves to the place where they were beyond saving. Had any been permitted to live, they would have infected Israel with their moral depravity.”

The story of the battle of Jerico is of another time, and there are those among us who reason that humanity has progressed beyond the barbaric tribalism that is recounted in page after page of biblical text. But here we are today witnessing the murder of infants in Gaza, not only through the use of modern weaponry but through starvation and the creation of conditions that foster disease and a lack of basic human necessities.

We must all be honest and give witness to the fact that we are merely standing aside as we witness the progression of this genocide; a genocide that no honest person can characterize as anything else.

Because there are large helpings of blame to share, everyone is serving blame up to the parties they oppose. But the truth is that most of the individuals currently breathing the air of this earth had not been born when this “conflict in the Middle East” began. Even if we examine history with clear-eyed objectivity, it is difficult to single out any one action that sets this never-ending horror into motion. Clearly, Jews were subjected to the unimaginable cruelty of the Holocaust by the German Third Reich. But then the response by the allied nations that defeated Germany in World War II was to shove aside people living in Palestine to create a homeland for a people who had been greatly oppressed in Europe. The European imaginary of Palestine as being populated with undeserving people had a great deal to do with the acquiescence to Jewish demands for a homeland there.

There is debate over the origin and significance of the slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land” being justification for the Jewish occupation of Palestine. But it cannot be denied that this slogan, which has been documented as having been around since the mid-nineteenth century and espoused by both Christians and Jews, is a clear indication of the widespread perception of Palestinians being less than deserving of the land on which they lived.

The propensity towards colonialism or neocolonialism can not be ascribed to any particular ethnic or religious group and there are significant numbers of heroes and villains in every family of humankind, but we are witnessing the effects of a proposed sharing that was deemed unfair from its inception. In 1947, when the United Nations drew up its first plan to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states it allocated approximately 56% of the land for a Jewish state, while about 43% was designated for an Arab state even though it was acknowledged that the land contained only 600,000 Jews, as opposed to 1.2 million Palestinians. This plan provided no rational explanation as to why the Jewish population, which was half the size of the Arab population was to receive the majority of the land. Because of this, the plan was rejected by the Palestinians and most, if not all, of the surrounding Arab nations as being patently unfair. This is just one of the many threads of contention between people who have lived at odds with each other for decades. But if we, as citizens of the global community are to be worthy of our belief in our “humanness,” it is incumbent upon us to make this right and find a fair and just solution to this tragedy.

With all the human suffering in the world due to natural disasters, it is shameful that we are so base as to create manmade disasters of biblical proportions. The suffering in Gaza has been created by people, and people should be able to bring it to an end. We must come together and listen to our better angels and make this right.